PHPBenelux Conference 2013

The conference and tutorials will take place at the Best Western Hotel Ter Elst in Antwerp (Belgium). Friday morning January 25th we have a set of tutorials. The conference is spread over 2 days: Friday afternoon (after the tutorials) and Saturday the 26th. Tutorials as well as the conference itself are spread over several parallel tracks.

On Friday evening, we’re having the conference social. This will include drinks and bowling as we managed to reserve the entire bowling alley.

The organization of the event, as well as the venue were good as usual! I didn't have any problem with the heating in the Nucleus and King Foo rooms. The other large one was pretty hot indeed, which made it hard to concentrate.
The food distribution was better organized on Friday as there was much more space for both queues and tables to stand.

Superb edition once again, props to the organisers and volunteers.
Some tips for next year(s)

- Full day tutorials!!
- Lunch on day 2 was pure chaos, the lobby is really too small for the amount of people, maybe use the room where the 2nd day social was held next time?
- Half way through each talk it was really getting hot in the rooms

Nice conference, I don't really have material to compare because it was my first, but it was a really nice experience. Met a lot of people and had a really good time during the socials. Off course learned some new stuff during the talks so thank you for that.

All my points of improvement are already mentioned so I have nothing to add to that.

really liked the conference. an excellent level of talks and a great crowd. also loved the schedule with enough breaks between the talks to let people talk together and socialize.

regarding internet, i have been to quite a few conferences and think so far i have not yet seen one infrastructure that survived the onslaught of hundreds of developpers with probably each having several devices that want to connect to internet...

I was positively impressed by the change compared to the previous years. The conference has visibly grown and matured, both in the number of attendees as well as the quality of the speakers. It was a great experience. We'll be back in '14! The one big let-down was the Telenet internet (non)experience; in the end I just gave up logging in again after every move around the venue, it was just too much hassle. PLEASE Telenet, get some user experience advice in this matter.

This was my third year at the PHPBenelux conference and I really enjoyed this one. So much big and little improvements. The speakers were great and the talks I've been to were all very interesting.

The only real negative point is something that comes up every year and is the WiFi that's provided for the attendees. I don't think I need to elaborate about it further, I think the organisers already know judging from the comments above. Perhaps it would be an interesting idea to search for a sponsor next year that wants to sponsor the WiFi so we don't need to use the Telenet hotspot anymore?

I had much fun, learned a bunch, talked to a lot of great people and enjoyed every minute of it. Can't wait for next year! :)

Can only echo the sentiments expressed above, especially regarding the indication of which food was vegetarian. Asking the staff definitely helped; on day one they were very friendly, and tried to accomodate. On day two, faced with the massive queue, the helpfulness dropped - just a half-plate of spinach-goop was not that satisfying.

The internet connection was depressing. I think I've entered that same username/password over fifty times during the conference. Also, big downloads (like downloading new versions of packages, or large sourcecode tarballs) would abruptly stop after about 40MB, with no way to resume.